Without Lifting A Finger

Eureka! It was an easy find because the passage is near the beginning. Here goes:      In his search for a commode to store his belongings Hugh Person, a tidy man, noticed that the middle drawer of an old desk relegated to a dark corner of the room, and supporting there a bulbless and shadeless lamp resembling the carcass of a broken umbrella, had not been reinserted properly by the lodger or servant (actually neither) who had been the last to check if it was empty (nobody had). My good Hugh tried to woggle it in; at first it refused to budge; then, in response to the antagony of a chance tug (which could not help profiting from the cumulative energy of several jogs) it shot out and spilled a pencil. This he briefly considered before putting it back.      It was not a hexagonal beauty of Virginia juniper or African cedar, with the maker's name imprinted in silver foil, but a very plain, round, technically faceless old pencil of cheap pine, ...

Pninism: "I search, John, for the viscous and sawdust" = I search, Joan, for the whiskey(s) and soda" * The pencil figures hugely in Invitation to a Beheading and, though foggy from distance, there's a wonderfully magic passage in Transparent Things re this writing implement (I believe, along with the index card, it was Nabokov's weapon of choice). Anyway, here's a third paean to the pencil in Pnin: With the help of the janitor he screwed onto the side of the desk a pencil sharpener -- that highly satisfying, highly philosophical implement that goes ticonderoga-ticon-deroga, feeding on the yellow finish and sweet wood, and ends up in a kind of soundlessly spinning ethereal void as we all must.